In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, widely recognized as one of the most important yet difficult philosophers of the 20th century. In this much-needed introduction, Davis unpacks the concepts at the centre of Levinas's thought - alterity, the Other, the Face, infinity - concepts which have previously presented readers with major problems of interpretation. Davis traces the development of Levinas's thought over six decades, describing the context in which (...) he worked, and the impact of his writings. He argues that Levinas's work remains tied to the ontological tradition with which he wants to break, and demonstrates how his later writing tries to overcome this dependency by its increasingly disruptive, sometimes opaque, textual practice. He discusses Levinas's theological writings and his relationship to Judaism, as well as the reception of his work by contemporary thinkers, arguing that the influence of his work has led to a growing interest in ethical issues among poststructuralist and postmodernist thinkers in recent years. Comprehensive and clearly written, this book will be essential reading for students and researchers in continental philosophy, French studies, literary theory and theology. (shrink)

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, widely recognized as one of the most important yet difficult philosophers of the 20th century. In this much-needed introduction, Davis unpacks the concepts at the centre of Levinas's thought - alterity, the Other, the Face, infinity - concepts which have previously presented readers with major problems of interpretation. Davis traces the development of Levinas's thought over six decades, describing the context in which (...) he worked, and the impact of his writings. He argues that Levinas's work remains tied to the ontological tradition with which he wants to break, and demonstrates how his later writing tries to overcome this dependency by its increasingly disruptive, sometimes opaque, textual practice. He discusses Levinas's theological writings and his relationship to Judaism, as well as the reception of his work by contemporary thinkers, arguing that the influence of his work has led to a growing interest in ethical issues among poststructuralist and postmodernist thinkers in recent years. Comprehensive and clearly written, this book will be essential reading for students and researchers in continental philosophy, French studies, literary theory and theology. (shrink)

The great Roman historian Livy describes a radical attempt at conflict resolution in his version of the story of the Horatii. The warring cities of Rome and Alba agree to settle their differences by pitting two sets of triplets against each other in a battle to the death. Two of the Roman champions, the Horatii, are killed, but the remaining brother wins the day for his city. In a further twist, he then goes on to kill his sister when he (...) finds her grieving for one of the dead Alban brothers, to whom she was betrothed. Although guilty of a dreadful crime, by the will of the people the murderer is spared because of his services to the state. In the version of the story dramatized by the seventeenth-century French playwright Pierre Corneille, it is rather the Roman king who saves the surviving Horatius by deeming that his heroism places him above the law. This article considers whether the interests of the state can offset private crimes, as appears to be the case in the versions of the story told by both Livy and Corneille; and it concludes by referring to Livy's continuation of the story, which shows the resolution of the conflict to be short-lived. (shrink)

Although Levinas showed relatively little interest in secular literature, and indeed he was sometimes distinctly hostile towards it, some of his essays sketch a phenomenological account of the reading experience which is applicable to non-sacred texts. This article compares Levinas’s phenomenology of reading to that of Wolfgang Iser, and argues that it may be susceptible to some of the same criticisms. It then examines Levinas’s 1947 essay “L’Autre dans Proust” in the light of Proust’s Un amour de Swann, suggesting that (...) Levinas’s reading is blind to aspects of Proust’s writing which contradict his ethics. This finally raises questions about the viability of a genuinely enlightening, ethical encounter between reader and text, or between self and other. (shrink)

This contribution to a symposium on “lyric philosophy” argues that there is much in Jan Zwicky's work that should make it attractive to literary critics, in particular her insistence that form and content are inextricably bound up with one another. Lyric compositions should not be assessed by reason and logic alone, she holds, and they should not be understood solely in terms of their propositional content. She acknowledges that full understanding employs the imagination and takes account of metaphor. However, some (...) critics may be less willing to accept Zwicky's suggestion that there is a world, and an experience of the world, that is available to us without linguistic mediation and structuring. This article questions whether there a kind of meaning that can be understood preverbally and intuitively. The discussion concludes with a consideration of Zwicky's comments on Rainer Maria Rilke's sonnet “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” Contrary to her own principles, she offers a prose summary of the poem that does not take account of its lyric form and thereby misses some of its most enigmatic features. Whereas Zwicky would have it that the reader of such a poem can achieve a preverbal intuition of its meaning, the article suggests that, when we attend carefully to the words of the poem, we will be intriguingly perplexed. (shrink)

In the last decade, reading research has seen a paradigmatic shift. A new wave of computational models of orthographic processing that offer various forms of noisy position or context-sensitive coding have revolutionized the field of visual word recognition. The influx of such models stems mainly from consistent findings, coming mostly from European languages, regarding an apparent insensitivity of skilled readers to letter order. Underlying the current revolution is the theoretical assumption that the insensitivity of readers to letter order reflects the (...) special way in which the human brain encodes the position of letters in printed words. The present article discusses the theoretical shortcomings and misconceptions of this approach to visual word recognition. A systematic review of data obtained from a variety of languages demonstrates that letter-order insensitivity is neither a general property of the cognitive system nor a property of the brain in encoding letters. Rather, it is a variant and idiosyncratic characteristic of some languages, mostly European, reflecting a strategy of optimizing encoding resources, given the specific structure of words. Since the main goal of reading research is to develop theories that describe the fundamental and invariant phenomena of reading across orthographies, an alternative approach to model visual word recognition is offered. The dimensions of a possible universal model of reading, which outlines the common cognitive operations involved in orthographic processing in all writing systems, are discussed. (shrink)

A newcomer to the writing of this survey quickly learns that they do not serve who only sit and wait. The expectation, in other words, that the year's major books of French philosophy will arrive unsolicited, is not fulfilled. Instead one is faced with a miscellaneous set of publications covering such varied topics as Jewish mysticism, cybernetics and a translation from Spanish of a primer of political economy. I must therefore beg readers to be indulgent enough to pay for (...) my first lesson, promising them that henceforth I shall bestir myself and forage. (shrink)

A newcomer to the writing of this survey quickly learns that they do not serve who only sit and wait. The expectation, in other words, that the year's major books of French philosophy will arrive unsolicited, is not fulfilled. Instead one is faced with a miscellaneous set of publications covering such varied topics as Jewish mysticism, cybernetics and a translation from Spanish of a primer of political economy. I must therefore beg readers to be indulgent enough to pay for (...) my first lesson, promising them that henceforth I shall bestir myself and forage. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Empirical Questions Deserve Empirical AnswersColin MartindaleWhat is wrong with the current state of humanistic literary studies? On the theoretical level, we find various types of postmodernism, none of which makes much sense. On the other hand, there are approaches such as Marxism, Feminism, and the New Historicism. One can at least understand the contentions of such theorists, but these contentions are generally quite implausible. If poetry were an effective (...) means of maintaining the status quo or of oppressing anyone, one wonders why this was never noticed by politicians or generals. Now that the fact has been “discovered,” one wonders why it is not put to use by the power elite. What has led literary theory to stray onto such strange grounds? I believe that the faulty methods used by many literary theorists offer us at least part of an answer.Humanistic critics have no reasonable way of deciding among alternative answers if theorists happen to ask a question that is answerable—i.e., if they propose an empirical investigation. Their only method is one of producing examples and trying to persuade the reader. 1 Can a scientific approach provide something better? Certainly it can. First, the scientist does not pose unanswerable questions. Second, science provides methods for resolving disputes, for answering questions that are answerable. These methods are the scientific apparatus of counting, measuring, experimenting, and so on. Humanistic inquiry is simply not as effective as scientific inquiry. If a question is meaningful, it is by definition an empirical question. Science is the only method to us available for answering such questions. Humanism has no decision-making methods, no objective methods of choosing amongst competing hypotheses. [End Page 347]To paraphrase Plato, literary critics hypothesize many fine things but know nothing of how to test them. Science already has the methods. We merely need to apply them. To give an example from my own research, Raymond and a number of other literary scholars tried to say that across the course of the nineteenth century, the content of French poetry became more primary process (Freud), dedifferentiated (Werner), associative (Wundt), or mythic (Cassirer) in its content. 2 Unless one can translate Raymond’s comments into these theoretical terms, it is difficult to understand what in the world he is talking about, let alone to test his contention. Because literary critics usually make up their psychology as they go along, it is difficult to understand what they say. Because they have only a proof-by-example method, it is difficult to believe what they say. If we do make the translation and develop a metric to measure the degree to which poetic content is primary process, we can test Raymond’s hypothesis and find out if it is correct. 3 We can not only find out if it is correct. We can fit curves to the data, compute rates of change, relate rates of change to other variables, and so on. One cannot fit curves to what Lotman aptly called “literary chit-chat.” 4 Without such an objective measure of primary process content, one would no doubt assert that twentieth-century poetry is even more mythic in its content, because the poets themselves have said so. 5 In fact, the metric confirms Plato’s warning that poets lie.Some literary theorists, of course, do things that are at least close to science. Numbers would be of great help to such theorists if only as mnemonic devices. Given that people cannot hold more than about seven things in mind at once, the task of sorting out and comparing hundreds of texts is very difficult unless some counting is done. 6 Humanists can count, but they seem not to realize the value of this ability. Lévi-Strauss and the structuralists were doing what might be called zero-degree science. 7 It is reasonable to segment texts and look for regularities. It is not reasonable to look for regularities before one has determined the reliability of the segmentations: that is, before one has determined whether people agree as to how to segment texts. To compute a reliability coefficient, one has to use numbers, and one has to know the formula. Humanists don’t... (shrink)

The 14 chapters in _Ethics at the End of Life: New Issues and Arguments_, all published here for the first time, focus on recent thinking in this important area, helping initiate issues and lines of argument that have not been explored previously. At the same time, a reader can use this volume to become oriented to the established questions and positions in end of life ethics, both because new questions are set in their context, and because most of the (...) chapters—written by a team of experts—survey the field as well as add to it. Each chapter includes initial summaries, final conclusions, and a Related Topics section. TABLE OF CONTENTS John K. Davis, "Introduction" Geoffrey Scarre, "Is it possible to be better off dead?" Taylor W. Cyr, "How Does Death Harm the Deceased?" Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin, "The Significance of an Afterlife" Jens Johansson, "The Severity of Death" John K. Davis, "Defining Death" James Stacey Taylor, "Autonomy, Competence, and End of Life" Eric Vogelstein, "Deciding for the Incompetent" Paul T. Menzel, "Change of Mind: An Issue for Advance Directives" Nancy S. Jecker, "Medical Futility and Respect for Patient Autonomy" Paul T. Menzel, "Refusing Lifesaving Medical Treatment and Food and Water by Mouth" Thomas S. Huddle, "Suicide, Physician-Assisted Suicide, the Doing-Allowing Distinction and Double Effect" Michael Cholbi, "Grief and End of Life Surrogate Decision-making" Bruce Jennings, "Solidarity near the End of Life: The Promise of Relational Decision-making in the Care of the Dying" Colin Farrelly, "Justice and the Aging of the Human Species". (shrink)

The 14 chapters in _Ethics at the End of Life: New Issues and Arguments_, all published here for the first time, focus on recent thinking in this important area, helping initiate issues and lines of argument that have not been explored previously. At the same time, a reader can use this volume to become oriented to the established questions and positions in end of life ethics, both because new questions are set in their context, and because most of the (...) chapters—written by a team of experts—survey the field as well as add to it. Each chapter includes initial summaries, final conclusions, and a Related Topics section. TABLE OF CONTENTS John K. Davis, "Introduction" Geoffrey Scarre, "Is it possible to be better off dead?" Taylor W. Cyr, "How Does Death Harm the Deceased?" Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin, "The Significance of an Afterlife" Jens Johansson, "The Severity of Death" John K. Davis, "Defining Death" James Stacey Taylor, "Autonomy, Competence, and End of Life" Eric Vogelstein, "Deciding for the Incompetent" Paul T. Menzel, "Change of Mind: An Issue for Advance Directives" Nancy S. Jecker, "Medical Futility and Respect for Patient Autonomy" Paul T. Menzel, "Refusing Lifesaving Medical Treatment and Food and Water by Mouth" Thomas S. Huddle, "Suicide, Physician-Assisted Suicide, the Doing-Allowing Distinction and Double Effect" Michael Cholbi, "Grief and End of Life Surrogate Decision-making" Bruce Jennings, "Solidarity near the End of Life: The Promise of Relational Decision-making in the Care of the Dying" Colin Farrelly, "Justice and the Aging of the Human Species". (shrink)

The 14 chapters in Ethics at the End of Life: New Issues and Arguments, all published here for the first time, focus on recent thinking in this important area, helping initiate issues and lines of argument that have not been explored previously. At the same time, a reader can use this volume to become oriented to the established questions and positions in end of life ethics, both because new questions are set in their context, and because most of the (...) chapters--written by a team of experts--survey the field as well as add to it. Each chapter includes initial summaries, final conclusions, and a Related Topics section. TABLE OF CONTENTS John K. Davis, "Introduction" Geoffrey Scarre, "Is it possible to be better off dead?" Taylor W. Cyr, "How Does Death Harm the Deceased?" Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin, "The Significance of an Afterlife" Jens Johansson, "The Severity of Death" John K. Davis, "Defining Death" James Stacey Taylor, "Autonomy, Competence, and End of Life" Eric Vogelstein, "Deciding for the Incompetent" Paul T. Menzel, "Change of Mind: An Issue for Advance Directives" Nancy S. Jecker, "Medical Futility and Respect for Patient Autonomy" Paul T. Menzel, "Refusing Lifesaving Medical Treatment and Food and Water by Mouth" Thomas S. Huddle, "Suicide, Physician-Assisted Suicide, the Doing-Allowing Distinction and Double Effect" Michael Cholbi, "Grief and End of Life Surrogate Decision-making" Bruce Jennings, "Solidarity near the End of Life: The Promise of Relational Decision-making in the Care of the Dying" Colin Farrelly, "Justice and the Aging of the Human Species". (shrink)

This book was originally published in French in 1988 under the title L'Experience de la Liberte. [[sic]] The present volume adds a translator's note, endnotes, and the foreward. The title of the book is mischievous, in that it leads the reader to expect to be shown some kind of experience of freedom as contrasted with other experiences, possibly of bondage, compulsion, or necessity. However, the author's thesis is not that we experience freedom, for instance, when we can act (...) as we please or when we have the power of self-determination. What is "freedom?" It is easier to say what it is not. "Freedom to do, to act, or freedom in view of..., freedom as an essence to be realized or as a given nature, responsible freedom and responsibility toward freedom, freedom as right or power,... free will, recognition of common law, individual or collective freedom, civil, economic, political, social, cultural freedoms, the assumption of necessity, anarchy, libertine or libertarian freedom, liberality, freedom of movements, freedom of spirit, the free end of a rope or chain--none of these should escape our attention, yet none of these exactly matches what is at stake here under the name of 'freedom'". (shrink)

_John Dewey and Continental Philosophy_ provides a rich sampling of exchanges that could have taken place long ago between the traditions of American pragmatism and continental philosophy had the lines of communication been more open between Dewey and his European contemporaries. Since they were not, Paul Fairfield and thirteen of his colleagues seek to remedy the situation by bringing the philosophy of Dewey into conversation with several currents in continental philosophical thought, from post-Kantian idealism and the work of Friedrich Nietzsche (...) to twentieth-century phenomenology, hermeneutics, and poststructuralism. This unique volume includes discussions comparing and contrasting Dewey with the German philosophers G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer on such topics as phenomenology, naturalism, organicism, contextualism, and poetry. Others investigate a series of connections between Dewey and contemporary French philosophy, including the notions of subjectivity, education, and the critique of modernity in Michel Foucault; language and politics in Jacques Derrida; and the concept of experience in Gilles Deleuze. Also discussed is the question of whether we can identify traces of _Bildung_ in Dewey’s writings on education, and pragmatism’s complex relation to twentieth-century phenomenology and hermeneutics, including the problematic question of whether Heidegger was a pragmatist in any meaningful sense. Presented in intriguing pairings, these thirteen essays offer different approaches to the material that will leave readers with much to deliberate. _ John Dewey and Continental Philosophy_ demonstrates some of the many connections and opportunities for cross-traditional thinking that have long existed between Dewey and continental thought, but have been under-explored. The intersection presented here between Dewey’s pragmatism and the European traditions makes a significant contribution to continental and American philosophy and will spur new and important developments in the American philosophical debate. (shrink)

This lucidly written book looks at the interpretative audacity of five major "overreaders"—Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, Slavoj Žižek and Stanley Cavell—and asks what is at stake and what is to be gained by their ...

Sibley et al. (2008) report a recurrent neural network model designed to learn wordform representations suitable for written and spoken word identification. The authors claim that their sequence encoder network overcomes a key limitation associated with models that code letters by position (e.g., CAT might be coded as C‐in‐position‐1, A‐in‐position‐2, T‐in‐position‐3). The problem with coding letters by position (slot‐coding) is that it is difficult to generalize knowledge across positions; for example, the overlap between CAT and TOMCAT is lost. Although we (...) agree this is a critical problem with many slot‐coding schemes, we question whether the sequence encoder model addresses this limitation, and we highlight another deficiency of the model. We conclude that alternative theories are more promising. (shrink)

I argue, contra Frost, that when prime lexicality and target density are considered, it is not clear that there are fundamental differences between form priming effects in Semitic and European languages. Furthermore, identifying and naming printed words in these languages raises common theoretical problems. Solving these problems and developing a universal model of reading necessitates the orthographic input code.

This paper derives from an interest in murder. This interest began through reading fictional narratives which ceaselessly stage and restage scenes of murder; but it has also become clear that a range of theoretical texts are no less preoccupied with the basic question, ‘Why kill?’. In particular, the three theorists I shall discuss here, Freud, Girard and Levinas, directly address the question of murder, its causes and consequences. In each case, the theoretical question turns out to depend upon a minimal (...) core narrative in which the stakes of murder are crystallized; rival theoretical accounts are thus also bound up in a competition of stories. As this paper traces a common concern from Freud's Totem and Taboo, through Girard's La Violence et le sacré, to Levinas's Totalité et infini, the question ‘Why kill?’ gets entangled with the dynamics of storytelling and the issue of what it means to do theory. (shrink)

Freedom and the subject in Jean-Paul Sartre -- Freedom and necessity in Jacques Derrida -- Freedom and the subject in contemporary philosophy and theory -- Theorizing pathologies and therapeutics of freedom.

Can the reality of complex moral situations be represented by means other than those of imaginative literature?If we could readily agree with Martha Nussbaum that "certain novels are, irreplaceably, works of moral philosophy" (148), then we might already have an answer to the question of whether or not literature matters. It would matter to us to the exact extent that it might help to make our lives richer, better and fuller. Nussbaum, though, refers only to "certain novels" and not to (...) literature in general. She readily admits that not all novels will suit her interests (45). For every novel that is a major work of moral philosophy, there may be more that are morally indifferent or even reprehensible and damaging. .. (shrink)

Love is not stronger than death. In Death and Time Levinasreminds us that, contrary to how it is often quoted or remembered, The Song of Solomonsays that love is as strong as death not stronger than it . Love doesnot conquer death, it does not give to loss a sense which makes it bearable. And yetLevinas goes on to describe the claim that love is stronger than death as a ‘privilegedformula’ , suggesting that even if it is nottrue it is (...) worth saying and believing all the same. He refers to deliberately paradoxicalformulations by Vladimir Jankélévitch according to which love, thought, freedom andGod are all stronger than death, whilst death is also stronger than all of them . So Levinas suggests that love isstronger than death, death is stronger than love, and each is as strong as the other.There is no triumph of one over the other. Against Heidegger, Levinas insists that thedeath which concerns me is not my own so much as that of the beloved other. The deathof the beloved makes of me a guilty survivor, bereft of the possibility of dialogue with thedeceased. But even as I am torn apart in grief, death does not conquer love any morethan love conquers death. Death is not pure nothingness; something persists. Love is as strong as death. (shrink)

The dead will remain with us, Sartre remarks at the end of Les Mots, for as long as humanity roams the earth. The dead are never quite dead; they survive in what Sartre, in L'Etre et le néant, calls 'la vie morte' (dead life). In Huis clos, Sartre envisages an afterlife in which, although they can no longer act, the dead continue to agonize over the meaning of their lives and their now irrevocable actions. Sartre's script of Les Jeux sont (...) faits, filmed by Jean Delannoy and shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1947, goes a step further. It depicts two dead people given the chance to return to earth in the pursuit of love and, at the same time, the opportunity to rectify their earlier mistakes, to change the meaning of their lives by intervening more effectively in their worlds. Despite its supernatural story line, the stakes of Les Jeux sont faits are recognizably Sartrean. The film serves as an opportunity to probe the themes of freedom, responsibility, choice, the role of the individual agent in history, the self's opacity to itself, the conflict endemic in the human condition and the ways in which external circumstances make a mockery of our endeavours. It asks the question, if we were given a second chance, could we revisit the scenes of our failures and transform them into successes? Could we learn from our mistakes and lucidly remodel the world in the form of our desires? Or are we condemned only to fail again, to make the same mistakes twice over? (shrink)

We introduce this special issue on Thinking about Climate Change by reflecting on the role of psychology in responding adaptively to catastrophic global threats. By way of illustration we compare the threat posed by climate change with the extinction-level threat considered in the recent film Don’t Look Up [McKay, A. (Director). (2021). Don’t Look Up [Film]. Hyperobject Industries]. Human psychology is a critical element in both scenarios. The papers in this special issue discuss the importance of clear communication of scientific (...) information, the dangers of misinformation and the possible role played by motivated reasoning, all themes that are taken up in the film. Ultimately, though, it is not enough to consider psychological factors in isolation: we must also acknowledge that cognitive flaws and psychological motivations are exploited by vested interests that profit from delaying climate action. A global response to a global crisis requires us to ‘look up’ to recognise the threat and to ‘look around’ to go beyond specialist disciplines and national boundaries. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 371-373 [Access article in PDF] Book Review French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years: Memory, Narrative, Desire French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years: Memory, Narrative, Desire, by Colin Davis & Elizabeth Fallaize; 160pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, $24.95. Like the Mitterrand era itself, Davis and Fallaize's French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years is somewhat uneven. The election of (...) François Mitterrand in 1981 as the President of the Fifth Republic was a milestone in modern French history. After the conservative politics of the 1960s and 70s, the election of a socialist president and legislature seemed to offer the possibility of a new political and intellectual atmosphere. Indeed, the first two years of Mitterrand's presidency brought sweeping reforms. However, several scandals, continued economic problems and later "cohabitation" with a right-wing legislative majority muted the original verve. Mired in partisan politics, the government often appeared ineffectual.As with the political arena, French fiction of the 1980s was produced under the shadow of another long-standing French institution--the nouveau roman. Again we find a new direction, a turning-away from the past during the 1980s. Yet there was no outright refusal. There were no manifestos or polemical articles written by budding novelists, no claim to Literature. As Annie Ernaux describes her work Une Femme (1987): "Mon projet est de nature littéraire [...]. Mais je souhaite rester, d'une certaine façon, au-dessous de la littérature" (My project is of a literary nature [...]. But I wish to remain, in a certain way, beneath literature (p. 144).This lack of pretension is important, for it helps us better understand the writing of the period. As Davis and Fallaize point out, in the fiction of the Mitterrand years we find a return to history, to the subject, and to storytelling, three areas disdained by the new novelists of the 1950s and 60s (pp. 12-15). But at the same time, there is not an elegiac return to the conventions of the past. There are no didactic tales of Lucien de Rubempré's lost illusions. A good example of this is Patrick Roegiers's Beau Regard (1990), the account of a dinner during which hardly anyone speaks, told by a narrator who knows no one else at the table. Davis and Fallaize note: "In these novels the event is merely an incident, the story no more than an anecdote, and the anecdote merely a fait divers" (p. 147). Although not inconsequential, argue Davis and Fallaize, there is an unquestionable modesty to these texts.In the introduction to their work Davis and Fallaize write: "The aim of the current book is to analyze some of the most important and interesting directions in French fiction through detailed discussions of a selection of texts, all published during François Mitterrand's period as President of the Fifth Republic (1981-95)" (p. 1). This is exactly what they accomplish, selecting six novels--Duras's L'Amant (The Lover, 1984), Pennac's Au bonheur des ogres (The Scapegoat, 1985), Semprun's La Montagne blanche (1986), Echenoz's Lac (Lake, 1989), Guilbert's A l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauvé la vie (To the Friend Who Did Not Save [End Page 371] my Life, 1990), and Ernaux's Passion simple (Simple Passion, 1991)--and spending one chapter on each. They also discuss some of the important features of the era's fiction including memory, especially of World War II, contemporary culture and postmodernism, and autofiction.However, the book's limited goal also leads to some of its problems. As a whole, the work lacks cohesion. Chapters often read like individual essays. Moreover, although some chapters are well-grounded critically and contextually, others are not. Finally, the conclusion is too brief to synthesize aptly the various topics discussed in the previous chapters. The reader does not have a solid grasp of the fictional landscape of the Mitterrand years, but rather, as the introduction indicated, knowledge of "some of the [...] interesting directions in French fiction."One of the most illuminating chapters considers Daniel... (shrink)

In this introduction to part 2 of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means,” the journal's editor reflects on the difference between the contributions to parts 1 and 2. Whereas the first installment concentrated on ethnography, the second focuses on the peacemaking repertoire of the Greco-Latin tradition, whose basis is psychological. That tradition is characterized by its refusal of wishful thinking about human nature and, in particular, by its doubt about claims that human drives other than thumos — the (...) rage for self-aggrandizement — motivate the initiators of wars. Given this assumption about motive, the Greco-Latin tradition tends also to regard negotiations based on the rational discussion of material interests as unlikely to succeed. Success requires symbolic and ritual gestures — acts of self-humiliation on the part of those apparently with the greatest power — by which thumos is propitiated and pacified. Most of the introduction considers cases of such settlements, including two contemporary efforts at ritual peacemaking, a successful one by Queen Elizabeth II in Ireland and an unsuccessful one by Pope Francis in the Middle East. (shrink)

The Character of Mind provides a sweeping and accessible general introduction to the philosophy of mind. Colin McGinn covers all of the main topics--the mind-body problem, the nature of acquaintance, the relation between thought and language, agency, and the self.In particular, McGinn addresses the issue of consciousness, and the difficulty of combining the two very different perspectives on the mind that arise from introspection and from the observation of other people. This second edition has been updated with three new (...) cutting-edge chapters on consciousness, content, and cognitive science to make it the reader of choice on this vital topic. (shrink)

First published in 1964, this is not just a chronicle or encyclopaedia, but deals thoroughly in turn with meaning, view about reason, and views about values, particularly moral values. The author's knowledge of French literature is extensive and thorough, and a feature of the book is his analysis of the philosophical implications of literary works by Sartre, Paul Valery, Camus and others.

First published in 1964, this is not just a chronicle or encyclopaedia, but deals thoroughly in turn with meaning, view about reason, and views about values, particularly moral values. The author's knowledge of French literature if extensive and thorough, and a feature of the book is his analysis of the philosophical implications of literarry wroks by Sartre, Paul Valery, Camus and others.

This paper examines Hume's four essays on happiness: the "Epicurean," the "Stoic," the "Platonist," and the "Sceptic." I argue, first, that careful attention to how these essays are written shows that they do not simply argue for one position over others. They also elicit affective and imaginative responses in order to modify the reader's outlook and to improve the reader's understanding in service to moral ends. The analysis offers an improved reading of the essays and highlights the intimate (...) connections between the purposes of philosophical writing and its manner of presentation. Secondly, I contend that appreciating how Hume's essays on happiness work on the reader demonstrates the insufficiency of Hume's categories of "anatomist" and "painter.". (shrink)

Providing a comprehensive introduction to political philosophy, this 2006 book combines discussion of historical and contemporary figures, together with numerous real-life examples. It ranges over an unusually broad range of topics in the field, including the just distribution of wealth, both within countries and globally; the nature and justification of political authority; the meaning and significance of freedom; arguments for and against democratic rule; the problem of war; and the grounds for toleration in public life. It also offers an accessible, (...) non-technical discussion of perfectionism, utilitarianism, theories of the social contract, and of recently popular forms of critical theory. Throughout, the book challenges readers to think critically about political arguments and institutions that they might otherwise take for granted. It will be a provocative text for any student of philosophy or political science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Leo Strauss on Plato's Euthyphro ed. Hannes Kerber, and Svetozar Y. MinkovColin David PearsKERBER, Hannes, and Svetozar Y. Minkov, editors. Leo Strauss on Plato's Euthyphro. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2023. vii + 231 pp. Cloth, $74.95; paper, $22.95Leo Strauss is an enigmatic figure in the landscape of political philosophy, deeply committed to the restoration of political philosophy as the premiere discipline in academia. He spent his (...) career working to reopen le querelle des anciens et des modernes and the theologico-political problem underlying those tensions. Though, as the editors of this volume point out, Strauss's motivations were not merely historiographic and the evolution of his thought was not without significant, if fruitful, setbacks.Strauss's early thought is defined by his engagement with Maimonides, and especially Philosophy and Law (1935). Without fully abandoning the [End Page 550] traditional interpretation of Maimonides as reconciling Jewish and Aristotelian philosophy, Strauss advances Maimonides as an esoteric thinker with a more complex and nuanced philosophic perspective. Strauss later turned to al-Farabi, who like Maimonides grapples with the complex interrelation of reason, revelation, and the role of philosophy. It was during this era that Strauss, having just fled Nazi Germany in 1938, confirmed his view of esoterism in philosophic writing and jettisoned limited traditional interpretations.However, these phases of Strauss's early development prove short-lived. In 1946, Strauss "suffers" his famous "shipwreck," a profound philosophic crisis, which compelled him "to begin again from the beginning" (Strauss to Löwith, 1946). Al-Farabi had led Strauss back into a study of Plato and to the crisis of reason laid out in Plato's dialogues, the crux of which is the possibility that there may exist permanent limits on what philosophy or science can know about the fundamental nature of things. The implications this has regarding the legitimacy of divine revelation led to the "second sailing" suggested in the Phaedo, and to Strauss's complete reevaluation of the theologico-political problem.The present volume provides a view of Strauss's evolving thought immediately following his "shipwreck" and as he begins to critically elaborate on his view of the relationship between philosophy and religion. Included are Strauss's notebook on Plato's Euthyphro and Crito (1948), a draft of his first lecture on the Euthyphro (1950), notes for his second lecture on the Euthyphro and the text of the lecture itself (1952), as well as marginalia and selections from his copy of Plato's dialogue. Together, these materials make up the several layers surrounding the heart of Strauss's thought on the problems of justice and piety, or "whether the right and necessity of philosophy are completely evident."Reading this volume is an exercise in flipping back and forth between one section and another to the point where one is tempted to break the spine, separate the sections, and lay them out side by side. Strauss's notebook provides his line-by-line interpretation of the Platonic dialogues and forms the basis for both the draft of his first lecture, his notes on the second, and his 1952 lecture itself. Astute readers may already notice in the notebook how Strauss subtly opens up his view of piety, for example by taking seriously Euthyphro's first but formally flawed definition of piety and gradually refusing to position Euthyphro as a fool. Strauss's draft of his first lecture picks up the notebook's themes but still presents a view of piety more in line with the pro-philosopher stance presented early in the notes. By contrast, the 1952 lecture presents a more elegant formulation of Strauss's position, both in words and actions. That is, not only does the second lecture closely follow the notebook's nuanced exegesis, but it is also designed to stimulate the reader's thinking on the problems of justice and piety, rather than resolve these didactically.Strauss appears to have abandoned the approach he took in the first lecture in favor of an approach that echoed Plato's own presentation in the Euthyphro. He closes the 1952 lecture with two especially salient [End Page 551] points. Returning to his early claim... (shrink)

_Berkeley _was first published in 1982. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. In contemporary philosophy the works of George Berkeley are considered models of argumentative discourse; his paradoxes have a further value to teachers because, like Zeno's, they challenge a beginning student to find the submerged fallacy. And as a final, triumphant perversion of Berkeley's intent, his central contribution is still commonly (...) viewed as an argument for skepticism - the very position he tried to refute. This limited approach to Berkeley has obscured his accomplishments in other areas of thought - his account of language, his theories of meaning and reference, his philosophy of science. These subjects and others are taken up in a collection of twenty essays, most of them given at a conference in Newport, Rhode Island, commemorating the 250th anniversary of Berkeley's American sojourn of 1728–31. The essays constitute a broad survey of problems tackled by Berkeley and still of interest to philosophers, as well as topics of historical interest less familiar to modern readers. Its comprehensive scope will make this book appropriate for text use. (shrink)

The long eighteenth century is a crucial period in the history of ethics, when our moral relations to God, ourselves and others were minutely examined and our duties, rights and virtues systematically and powerfully presented. Colin Heydt charts the history of practical morality - what we ought to do and to be - from the 1670s, when practical ethics arising from Protestant natural law gained an institutional foothold in England, to early British responses to the French Revolution around (...) 1790. He examines the conventional philosophical positions concerning the content of morality, and utilizes those conventions to reinterpret the work of key figures including Locke, Hume, and Smith. Situating these positions in their thematic and historical contexts, he shows how studying them challenges our assumptions about the originality, intended audience, and aims of philosophical argument during this period. His rich and readable book will appeal to a range of scholars and students. (shrink)

In the context of an issue of Common Knowledge dedicated to instances of experimental scholarship and to discussion of them, this contribution by a social historian of medieval England sets out to demonstrate that an empirical alternative to tendentious and interpretive historiography, despite all claims to the contrary, is possible and valuable. In this monograph-length article, the texts of selected documents in the Adair Family Collection are set forth, often verbatim, and, though minutely contextualized, are subjected to only the lightest (...) analysis. Scant thematic cues organize this in-depth exploration of the wills, deeds of purchase, quitclaims, rentals, indentures, receipts, charitable bequests, and other legal and commercial transactions of John Tasburgh I, his wife Margery, John Tasburgh II, his wife Olive, and their families, dependents, assigns, and parishes. Peripheral attention is paid to the better-known John Hopton and to the family of John Paston I, II, and III. Richmond's own readings of texts and circumstances appear largely in the form of questions, as if he were writing marginalia for his own later use while reading. Thus, the historian does all the archival work necessary for readers to arrive at their own hypotheses about how rurality related to urbanity in fifteenth-century Suffolk and, perhaps, also about the meaning of the word urbane. (shrink)

The strange and challenging stretch of dialectic with which Plato’s Sophist begins and ends has confused and frustrated readers for generations, and despite receiving a fair amount of attention, there is no consensus regarding even basic issues concerning this method. Here I offer a new account of bifurcatory division as neither joke nor naïve method, but instead a valuable, propaedeutic method that Plato offers to us readers as a means of embarking upon the kind of mental gymnastics that will stretch (...) us properly in preparation for further, more challenging dialectical work. Considering several interpretive issues, I argue that bifurcatory division is a process of collective inquiry into the common through which an account, both definitional and taxonomical, is discovered. Depending on the level of understanding exhibited by the inquirers, this account may or may not allow for noetic understanding of the object in the deepest sense. (shrink)

This article makes the case for the largely unacknowledged relevance of the thought of the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, for the emerging field of the medical and/or health humanities. From the 1930s all the way through to the late 1970s, Lacan was deeply concerned with the ethical and political consequences of then-dominant conceptions of the human in the ‘psy’ disciplines. His attempt to ‘humanise’ these disciplines involved an emphasis on humans as symbolic beings, inevitably entangled in the structures of (...) speech and the ‘logic of the signifier.’ This article explores the implications of Lacan’s linguistic framework for his understanding of trauma. It argues that the Lacanian concept of trauma offers a timely antidote to dominant psychiatric notions of trauma today, linked as they are to the questionable politics of ‘Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder’ and, more recently, of ‘Post-Traumatic Growth.’. (shrink)

A book on human communication that is worthy of its subject must introduce the reader to the dynamic interaction of a number of diverse fields. Colin Cherry's book, over successive editions, has served for twenty years as perhaps the most literate and readable introduction to this interaction available. Readers have consistently found that fields within their specialty are covered with authority; that fields far removed are covered with clarity; and that the connections among them are shown to be (...) close and natural. This third edition includes a new chapter, "Feeling, Knowledge, and Understanding," that extends the book's reach into philosophy, and in particular communicates some existential points-of-view. In it the author undertakes to demonstrate that "The language of physical science is inadequate for discussion of what is essentially human about human communication." In addition, numerous changes have been introduced throughout the text, and the bibliography has been expanded and updated. (shrink)

In bringing intentions, understandings, meanings and interactions down to earth this book invites its readers to account for the complex communications between ...

In England, Higher Education institutions, together with the schools whose staff they train, are being required to incorporate synthetic phonics as one of the key approaches to the teaching of reading. Yet even if synthetic phonics can be identified as one of the component ‘skills’ of reading, an assumption vigorously contested in this paper, it does not follow that it can or should be taught explicitly and independently of reading for meaning. Imposing such a ‘method’ is, at a deep level, (...) incompatible with teachers acting as teachers and potentially constitutes a kind of abuse of early readers. Moreover, because of the conceptual difficulties confronting any attempt to specify synthetic phonics as an approach, there cannot exist, in principle, empirical research that actually supports its value. Current policy in England since the Rose Report, at least, assumes the opposite. All this cannot be dismissed as a little local difficulty for England concerning the teaching of reading English with all its spelling irregularities: there are broader implications for the relationship between research and teaching, together with continuing tendencies to impose ‘teacher proof’ approaches on schools and their staff in many countries. (shrink)